Add json serialization for tools.

[schmmd]

Resolves #34.

[dirkgr]

Are you going to add tests for this?

[dirkgr]

Nevermind. Found it.

[dirkgr]

The serialization for the graph is just the edges, with the nodes repeated every time they are part of an edge. I'm not terribly happy about that, for two reasons.

1. If the nodes get more information on them, we'll waste space having them multiple times. Also, when we deserialize, we'll have to deal with the possibility that we'll have two nodes with the same id, with different content. I could see this happen especially when we manually mess with the serialization in a text editor.
2. We can't serialize a graph that has a single, disconnected node in it.

[schmmd]

What would you propose? Maybe I should just remove the dependency graph serialization for now.

[dirkgr]

I propose that the serialization of the graph is a list of nodes, followed by a list of edges. The list of edges references nodes by id, or by index into the list of nodes.

That’s how GraphML, GraphSON, and those other formats all do it.

On 2014-07-14, at 13:41, Michael Schmitz notifications@github.com wrote:

What would you propose? Maybe I should just remove the dependency graph serialization for now.

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[schmmd]

I removed the graph serialization so we can use something more standard when we potentially change the underlying graph library.